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The objective is to assess the relationship between financial inclusion and bank profitability in emerging economies, i.e. “Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, and Vietnam”.

The second-generation econometrics of panel data has been applied to examine the cross-section independence and control the heterogeneity between cross sections. Additionally, the authors employ the following tests for the analysis: “the unit root test, Westerlund's (2007) bootstrap cointegration, Pedroni cointegration, fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS), and heterogeneous panel causality techniques”. The annual data consist of the period from 2000 to 2019.

The findings reveal that financial inclusion fosters bank profitability. Therefore, easier access to financial services and products will maximize banks' profitability. Additionally, the association between financial inclusion and bank profitability is unidirectional.

This research is a first attempt to bring a novel contribution to the subject of emerging economies by investigating the association between financial inclusion and bank profitability. Another unique addition to the literature is the use of a novel financial inclusion index. At last, a panel cointegration technique, FMOLS and heterogeneous panel non-causality tests are taken into consideration for the in-depth analysis.

This article investigates the dynamic implication of healthcare expenditure on economic growth in the selected ten Sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2000–2018.

The study methodology included dynamic heterogenous panel, using mean group and pooled mean group estimators. The investigation of the healthcare expenditure and economic growth nexus was achieved while controlling the effects of investment, savings, labor force and life expectancy via interaction terms.

The results from linear healthcare expenditure have a significant positive impact on economic growth, while the nonlinear estimates through the interaction terms between healthcare expenditure and investment have a negative statistically significant impact on growth. The marginal effect of healthcare expenditure evaluated at the minimum and maximum level of investment is positive, suggesting the impact of health expenditure on growth does not vary with the level of investments. This result responds to the primary objective of the article.

In policy terms, the impact of investment on healthcare is essential to addressing future health crises. The impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) can never be separated from the shortages or low prioritization of health against other sectors of the economy. The article also provides an insight to policymakers on the demand for policy reform that will boost and make the health sector attractive to both domestic and foreign direct investment.

Given the vulnerability of SSA to the health crisis, there are limited studies to examine this phenomenon and first to address the needed investment priorities to the health sector infrastructure in SSA.

The development of green economy is of academic and policy importance to governments and policymakers worldwide. In the light of the necessity of renewable energy to sustain green economic growth, this study aims to examine the relationship between renewable energy consumption and green economic growth, controlling for the impact of trade openness for Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries over the period 1990-2015, within a multivariate panel data framework.

To investigate the long-run relationship between variables, panel cointegration tests are performed. Panel Granger causality based on vector error correction models is adopted to understand the short- and long-run dynamics of the data. Furthermore, ordinary least square (OLS), dynamic OLS and fully modified OLS methods are used to confirm the long-run elasticity of green growth for renewable energy consumption and trade openness. Moreover, system generalized method of moment is applied to eliminate serial correlation, heteroscedasticity and endogeneity problems. The authors used the panel Granger causality test developed by Dumitrescu and Hurlin (2012) to infer the directionality of the causal relationship, allowing for both the cross-sectional dependence and heterogeneity.

The results suggest that renewable energy consumption and trade openness exert positive effects on green economic growth. The results of long-run estimates of green economic growth reveal that the long-run elasticity of green economic growth for trade openness is much greater than for renewable energy consumption. The estimated results of the Dumitrescu and Hurlin (2012) test reveal bidirectional causality between green economic growth and renewable energy consumption, providing support for the feedback hypothesis.

This paper provides strong evidence of the contribution of renewable energy consumption on green economy for a wide range of countries. Despite the costs of establishing renewable energy facilities, it is evident that these facilities contribute to the green growth of an economy. Governments and public authorities should promote the consumption of renewable energy and should have a support policy to promote an active renewable energy market. Furthermore, the regulators must constitute an efficient regulatory framework to favor the renewable energy consumption.

Many countries focus on increasing their GDP without taking the environmental impacts of the growth process into account. This paper shows that renewable energy consumption points to the fact that countries can still increase their economic growth with minimal damage to environment. Despite the costs of adopting renewable energy technologies, there is still room for economic growth.

This paper provides evidence on the contribution of renewable energy consumption on green economic growth for a wide range of countries. The paper focuses on the impact of renewable energy on economic growth by taking environmental degradation into consideration on a wide scale of countries.

The authors estimate the multiplier effect of government public infrastructure investment in Spain. This paper aims to use annual data of the 17 Spanish autonomous communities for the 1980–2016 period.

The authors use dynamic acyclic graphs and the heterogeneous panel structural vector autoregressive (P-SVAR) method of Pedroni (2013). This method is robust to cross-sectional heterogeneity and dependence, which are present in the data.

The findings suggest that an increase in the level of government public infrastructure investment generates a positive and persistent effect on the level of output. Five years after the fiscal expansion, the multiplier effects of government public infrastructure investment reach values above one. This confirms that government public infrastructure investment expansions have Keynesian effects. The authors also find that the multiplier effects differ between autonomous communities with above-average and below-average GDP per capita.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no research uses dynamic acyclic graphs and heterogeneous P-SVAR techniques to estimate fiscal multipliers of government public investment in Spain by using subnational data.

This study aims to explore the relationship between the growth threshold effect on renewable energy consumption (REC) in the major oil-producing countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) over the period 1990–2018.

This article used a dynamic panel threshold regression model introduced by Hansen (1996, 1999 and 2000) threshold (TR) models. The procedure is achieved using 5,000 bootstrapping replications and the grid search to obtain the asymptotic distribution and p-values. For the long-run relationship among our variables, the author followed the process in Pesaran et al. (1999) pooled mean group (PMG) for heterogeneous panels. Furthermore, for the robustness of our empirical results due to the sensitivity of the results to outliers, the author used the approach by Cook (1979) distance measure. The author applied quantile (QR) regression to explore the distribution of dependent variables following Bassett and Koenker (1982) and Koenker and Bassett (1978) approaches.

The results from the threshold effect test and threshold regression revealed a significant single threshold effect of growth level on REC. Furthermore, the result from the PMG estimation showed the growth of the variable, energy intensity, consumer prices and CO₂ emissions play a significant role in REC in major oil-producing countries in SSA. The growth threshold estimation results indicated one significant threshold value of 1.013% at one period lagged of real growth. The outlier’s sensitivity detention greatly influenced our empirical results.

The article filled the literature gap by applying a combined measure that is robustness to detect outliers in the data, which none of the studies in the literature addresses hitherto. Further, the article extends the quantile regression to growth – REC literature.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the asymmetric effect of oil production on environmental degradation in OPEC member countries from 1970–2019.

The authors build a nonlinear panel ARDL–PMG model using the Shin et al. (2014) nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach in panel form to assess both the short- and long-run impact of positive and negative oil production movements on CO₂ emissions.

The result demonstrates that the variables are cointegrated. According to the linear long run coefficients, oil production, FDI inflows and economic growth both have a positive and significant relationship with CO₂ emissions, implying that they deteriorate environmental quality in OPEC countries, while renewable energy has a negative relationship with CO₂, implying that increasing renewable energy improves environmental quality. The asymmetric findings prove that positive and negative shocks of oil production exert a positive effect on carbon emissions in short run and long run.

To begin with, the empirical assessments do not include all OPEC member nations; researchers are advised to resolve this constraint by looking at the economies of other OPEC members. Albeit the lack of data for other energy sources may serve as another constraint of this research, future research is expected to broaden the current framework via other energy sources such as nuclear, electricity, biomass, solar as well as wind.

The research adds to the body of knowledge as many of the prevailing studies in the literature failed to look at the asymmetric effect of oil production on the quality of environment. This is another gap in the literature that the current study is set out to fill. This study adds oil production as an explanatory variable and helps to extend the existing literature for OPEC countries, which could propose a solution to deal with ensuing environmental issues.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of industrialization and urbanization on CO₂ emissions in 20 African countries for the period 1980 to 2013.

In order to correct for cross-sectional dependence, this study adopts the use of pooled mean group. Also, the study contributes to the literature by estimating the direct, indirect and total effects of industrialization and urbanization on carbon emission.

The results show that industrialization and urbanization directly increase environmental degradation. Interestingly, industrialization and urbanization were also found to reduce environmental degradation through their indirect effects on per capita income. In general, the authors conclude that the indirect effect of industrialization will overcrowd the direct effect, and this will lead to a decline in the overall effect of industrialization on carbon emission. Also, the positive direct effect of urbanization outweighs the negative indirect effect, thus the overall effect of urbanization will endanger carbon emission in the long run.

The existing studies on emission, industrialization and urbanization have typically been biased toward Africa. This present study filled this gap. The choice of African countries is based on the notion that the continent is desirous of expanding her industrialization level. This has coincidentally led to the increase in urbanization growth rate as well as income level of former rural dwellers. The second contribution of this study is the “effects decomposition” into direct, indirect and total effects. This is to reveal some inherent information that might be missing.

This paper aims to empirically explore the effects of globalization, corruption perception, political stability, macroeconomic vulnerability and gross domestic savings on illicit financial outflows of 60 developing countries from 2004 to 2013.

Pedroni’s heterogeneous panel data methodology for co-integration is applied. Panel unit root tests reveal non-stationarity of each variable in level, and a battery of seven panel co-integration tests largely confirm long-run equilibrium relationship among the variables under study.

The panel vector error correction model estimates show that variables tend to converge toward long-run equilibrium at a very slow pace amid some short-term random fluctuations. At the same time, political stability reduces illicit financial outflows.

There are enhancing impacts of globalization, corruption perception, macroeconomic vulnerability and domestic gross savings on illicit financial outflows. Political stability dampens such outflows. To the authors’ knowledge, such studies are either very scant or non-existent.

This study aims to examine the nexuses between economic growth, trade openness, renewable energy consumption and environmental degradation among organization of petroleum exporting countries (OPEC) members over the period 1990–2019.

The empirical strategy for the study includes dynamic heterogeneous panel pooled mean group (PMG), mean group (MG) estimators and dynamic panel threshold regression (TR) analysis. For clarity, PMG and MG are used to explore the long-run relationship between the variables, whereas TR is used to uncover the actionable and complementary policy thresholds in the nexuses between green growth and environmental degradation.

The empirical evidence is based on the significant estimates from PMG and TR. First, using PMG, the study finding revealed a long-run relationship between economic growth and environmental degradation via the PMG estimator. Second, using TR, the study revealed an actionable threshold for carbon dioxide emissions (CO₂) metrics tons per capita (mtpc) not beyond a critical mass of 4.88mtpc, and the complementary policy threshold of 85% of the share of trade to gross domestic product, respectively.

The policy relevance of the thresholds is apparent to policymakers in the cartel and for policy formulation. The policy implication of this study is straightforward.

The novelty of this study stalk in the extant literature on providing policymakers with an actionable threshold for CO₂ emissions with the corresponding complementary threshold for trade policies in the nexuses between green growth and the environment.

The paper aims to explore the mechanisms linking the impact of financial development on economic growth and focuses on the long-term post-global financial crisis.

The study employs panel data for twenty-five European Union countries over the period 1995–2017. Principal Component Analysis is employed to produce two aggregate indices, namely financial banking sector development and stock market sector development. The empirical analysis is based on estimates through the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) method.

The results suggest that the outbreak of the crisis has led to a disruption of the positive finance-growth relationship, and the banking sector dominates in this adverse effect. The foreknowledge of the current study is that the linking mechanisms of the negative impact of financial development on economic growth, ten years after the global financial crisis, are household debt, private debt, and non-performing loans for the banking sector, while for the equity market this is the case through savings. Interestingly, the results reveal that unemployment increase excessively the borrowers' debt level and then the non-performing loans.

An implication is that the increase of credit supply and any monetary expansion along with lack of regulatory control and monitoring can lead banks to a higher risk exposure through household and private debt as well as non-performing loans. Besides, the higher levels of unemployment rates call attention for the trade-off between prudential regulation on the supply of loans and economic activity, since higher unemployment affect the non-performing loans and, as a consequence discourage the demand, increase precautionary savings, and cancel or postpone investment decisions, thus, affecting the equity market.

The paper provides useful insights to economists and policymakers who are interested in understanding the weakness of banking and stock market sectors to promote economic growth for a long time after the global financial crisis.